Secure Your Business Name

DBA stands for Doing Busi­ness As and is inter­change­able with the FBN or Fic­ti­tious Busi­ness Name. DBA or FBNs cre­ate a legal name for your busi­ness to oper­ate under. There is no national require­ment for, or agency to gov­ern, FBNs. Instead this falls to the state in which you are open­ing your busi­ness. The state of Cal­i­for­nia, like many other states, requires an FBN when you oper­ate a busi­ness under any name except the own­ers’ legal names. Cal­i­for­nia then turns the rest up the var­i­ous county clerks offices.

4 Rea­sons to get an FBN/​DBA

1. It’s required in most states.
2. Dis­al­lows use of your busi­ness name by others.
3. Banks require it before you can open a busi­ness account.
4. So you can accept and cash checks made out to your business.

Where to obtain your FBN/​DBA

• The rules are dif­fer­ent in every state, and you will need to check with your state.
• FBN/​DBAs make it easy to track down busi­nesses and asso­ciate their names with the owners.
• Most states require fees at a local level, a search to prove your name is unique, and pub­li­ca­tion of a notice, usu­ally a locally avail­able news­pa­per surfices.
• Locate the appro­pri­ate office or web­site to obtain the nec­es­sary forms, and pay the fees. We’ve pro­vided a state by state links page to get you started. Click here.

Cau­tion:

There many on-​line sites and busi­nesses offer­ing to do the paper­work for you – at approx­i­mately dou­ble (or more) the cost of going through the steps your­self. If start-​up costs are a con­sid­er­a­tion, go stand in line and save your money.

At renewal time, (every 5 years in Cal­i­for­nia) these com­pa­nies may con­tact you via let­ter offer­ing to com­plete your paper work for an out­ra­geous fee, in part count­ing on busi­ness own­ers’ belief that he has to repub­lish his FBN in a gen­eral cir­cu­la­tion news­pa­per, even when there have no changes to own­er­ships, name or location.

These com­pa­nies may look like offi­cial state or county notices. We aware!

Com­par­i­son:

Notice the dif­fer­ences between the State of Cal­i­for­nia legal code gov­ern­ing FBNs and 2 South­ern Cal­i­for­nia counties.

• State of Cal­i­for­nia Code
• County of Ventura
• County of Los Angeles

Tips:

In addi­tion, you will need a busi­ness license issued by all cities and local area in which you will be con­duct­ing busi­ness. With­out it, the local author­i­ties can shut your busi­ness down.

Going through the FBN/​DBA process typ­i­cally brings a new busi­ness owner into con­tact with gov­ern­men­tal pow­ers for the first time. Was it con­fus­ing, eas­ier than you expected or rel­a­tively unevent­ful for you? Please tell us about it with a com­ment or email